Atomistic study of capturing mechanism for defects of anti-reflective coating by polymer membranes

The bottom anti-reflective coating (BARC) layer is an effective way of suppressing the multiple inner reflections of light in photoresist materials for modern lithography. Although the siloxane-based polymers work sufficiently well as BARC, their performance can be compromised by even extremely small amount of defect components represented by cage-type Silsesquioxane molecules. In this paper, we perform atomistic modeling to understand what polymer materials can be efficiently used as filtering membranes to filter the defects from the BARC solution. From the analysis of the interactions between the defects and filtering membranes, we found that the polymer membranes with aromatic rings, such as Kapton, can more efficiently capture the BARC defects due to strong π–π interactions.